What I Learned from Fantasy Booking

[Big Red Machine]

As you all likely know, I have been doing an ongoing fantasy booking thread for the past thirteen months, starting at Raw 1000. A big part of my decision to do this was my not liking the direction the company seemed to be heading in, and because I fancy myself a good booker and a creative guy, I figured I would see what I could do, compare it to what WWE would do, and see which one I liked better. While I have the obvious advantage of not having to deal with things like egos, backstage politics, and unexpected injuries and releases (though I have tried to keep decently true to that, unless it was someone I had MAJOR plans for), there were (and are) still many times when I have a lot of trouble coming up with feuds and angles. We have all criticized the booking of the major promotions (and some of the less major ones, too), but I feel that my ongoing effort to book a product has given me more of an insight into some of the challenges of booking that others might not realize.


Seeing as how I don't have TV ratings or PPV buys to determine whether or not what I am doing is more financially successful than what WWE has done, the only method of comparison I had was creative success. Creative success is, of course, extremely subjective, but I figured that the best way to compare it "objectively" would be by comparing each wrestler (or, in the case of teams and stables, each unit) on the roster and determining who had more wrestlers in more important roles than the other (for example, WWE hasn't done anything with Wade Barrett, but I had built him up into a credible title contender, I get one point. Similarly, WWE has had Dolph Ziggler as a world champion but I have mostly been using him in the midcard, so WWE would get one point).

Confident in my own superiority, I expected to thoroughly thrash WWE, but as it turns out, the results were much closer than I expected (22-17 me, with a good chunk of them actually being debatable,... and some of those wins were just people I was doing something with, however unimportant, while WWE just plain wasn't using at all, like Aksana, who I have as Cesaro's valet... not an important position, but more than nothing).

Anyway, I think I have finally hit upon the reason for this, and that is that there are not simply enough top spots for everyone who deserves one. If you are running nine or ten matches per PPV (including the pre-show), that is, at most, about thirty spots, if you do some tag matches and fatal four ways and whatnot. Now look at all of the wrestlers you want to get on the show:
Cena, Dragon, Orton, Del Rio, Sheamus, Christian, RVD, Miz, Cesaro, Swagger, Prime Time Players, Colons, Ambrose, Ryback, Big Show, Kofi Kingston, Cody Rhodes, Damien Sandow, Brodus Clay, Dolph Ziggler, Seth Rollins, Roman Reigns, Tyson Kidd, Wade Barrett, Kane, R-Truth, Tensai, CM Punk, Mark Henry, The Wyatt Family, Justin Gabriel, Zack Ryder, Santino Marella, Big E. Langston, AJ Lee, Kaitlyn, Natalya, the Bellas, Tamina, the Usos…
That’s over forty right there, and that’s without bringing anyone up from NXT (which you obviously want to do to create new stars). Unfortunately, not everyone can be on the show, and a lot of the time, a very talented guy gets left off because you just don’t have a spot for them.

An opposite but complementary problem to that one is the fact that there are some people who you need to have on the show that you don’t have anything for. If you want to build someone up, you need to have them on the show. There are guys who you might want to get on the show because they have a lot of potential and you want to do something with them at some point, but you really don’t have any ideas of what to do with them yet. Those people also need spots, and this can contribute to not only taking spots from other guys, but also to making the show seem directionless if you have some big stars who really aren’t doing anything. You need to protect these guys because if you don’t it will be hard to build them up without months and months of build, so they wind up just wrestling in random tag matches and not taking the fall for months on end, or just doing nothing but backstage segments (I believe that both the Real Americans and Ryback are currently in this position in the WWE).

Once a guy hits a certain level, there is a major pressure to do something with him, and not doing so seems like you are wasting the talent. If you give someone a big push and then don’t follow up on it, it damages your ability to ever give them a big push again, because the fans won’t believe it (for an example of this, see Jack Swagger). It is very hard to think of something to do for everyone who needs something to do, even if you limit yourself to just the upper midcard. One of the reasons for this is that the sheer number of possibilities is extremely daunting. It is very intimidating to think of a storyline when you don’t even know who you want working with who and have no good way to figure it out short of pulling names from a hat. When I have booked my undercard angles, I tend to get a bunch of inspiration all at once, and usually because one of them somehow branches off of another, whereas my main event angles I tend to come up with on their own, with a clear goal in mind of where I want to be at the next Big Four show and booking backwards from there.


Another major challenge to booking angles (especially on the undercard) is the urge to be creative. You could, in theory, pull two names out of a hat and develop a competently booked feud from there, but if you do that too often, the feuds start to seem similar and feel like they lack personality. Being a competent booker is easy (well… unless you work for TNA apparently), but isn’t particularly fulfilling. Creative people want to be able to express their creativity, and often get down on themselves when they don’t feel that they are living up to their creative potential.
The other major pressure to be creative is from the fans. Booking competently is pretty easy, but the fans usually won’t find it very interesting. For an example of this, look at Cornette Era ROH. Pretty much everything made sense and the feuds were booked in such a way as to logically escalate and move towards a conclusion, but many fans lost interest in the product because it was not particularly… well… interesting. It is not enough to just be competent. You need to also have some feuds that have some sort of other creative aspect to them… something that gives them a personality of their own or something that makes them different.

Anyway, I hope you guys have enjoyed reading this, and next time you complain that your favorite wrestler isn’t being used well, remember… this sh*t is harder than it looks.

[cero2k]

the only difference is that in WWE, it's an actual team working together where everyone has some sort of writing career going on for them. The teams rarely focus on more than a single division and surely they have to fight for screen time, but I personally think that's more of the wrestlers problem than the writers problem, i wouldn't know that one.